RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. … I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.” — Ruprecht Polenz, former secretary general of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union.

Non-Muslim immigrants generally choose traditional German names for their children to facilitate their integration into German society. By contrast, Muslim immigrants almost invariably choose traditional Arabic or Turkish names, presumably to prevent their integration into German society. A 2006 study found that more than 90% of Turkish parents give their German-born children Turkish first names.

A 2016 study found that 32% of ethnic Turks in Germany agree that “Muslims should strive to return to a societal order such as that in the time of Mohammed.” More than one-third believe that “only Islam is able to solve the problems of our times.” One-fifth agree that “the threat which the West poses to Islam justifies violence.” One-quarter believe that “Muslims should not shake the hand of a member of the opposite sex.”

Muslim migrants in Germany who feel discriminated against should be given the right to change their legal names to Christian-sounding ones, according to a senior German politician.

The latest innovation in German multiculturalism is being championed by Ruprecht Polenz, a former secretary general of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He believes the German law which regulates name changes (Namensrecht) should be amended to make it easier for men named Mohammed to become Martin and women named Aisha to become Andrea.

German law generally does not allow foreigners to change their names to German ones, and German courts rarely approve such petitions. By custom and practice, German names are only for Germans.

According to Polenz, who served as a member of parliament for nearly two decades, the law in its current form is “ignorant” and should be changed:

“An ignorant law: the United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. It no longer appeared as though a family was not from the USA. I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.”

BERLIN—Four acts of violence in seven days have shattered Germany’s calm and revived an emotional debate over the security implications of taking in more than one million migrants and refugees in the past 20 months.

Police identified asylum applicants as suspects in three apparently unconnected high-profile attacks in the past week, from an ax attack on a train last week to a knife killing and a suicide blast late Sunday.

Only the ax rampage, in which a teenager registered as an Afghan refugee wounded five people, has been identified as Islamist terrorism. But all four incidents—including a German-Iranian teenager’s shooting spree in Munich on Friday that killed nine—have put the European Union’s most populous country on edge.

“I thought Germany was safe—no shooting, no terror,” said Faruk Sazil, a 30-year-old of Turkish origin, who owns and runs a Munich kebab stand next to the McDonald’s where the shooting spree began Friday. “Now I don’t know. Who can know?”

Authorities say the Munich shooter had been treated for depression and was obsessed by mass killings.

If there’s one lesson to be learned on the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War, it is that ‎brokered cease-fires and U.N. resolutions are not to be trusted in the Middle East, where the ‎definitions of “victory” and “defeat” are elusive.‎

For 34 days during the summer of 2006, Hezbollah pummeled the Jewish state with rockets, and the ‎Israel Defense Forces conducted airstrikes to destroy the infrastructure and weaponry of the ‎bloodthirsty Shiite organization, which — in typical Arab terrorist fashion — were strategically placed in ‎and around the homes and schools of civilians.‎

When the war was over, both sides declared victory, though then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ‎announcement sounded feeble to most Israelis. The regular IDF soldiers and reservists who ‎participated in the fighting felt particularly deflated and bitter. When the war was over, their stories of ‎inadequate equipment and lack of training for the missions they were sent to conduct emerged to ‎everyone’s horror and disgust. One friend of mine recounted having to improvise all the time — for ‎example, by using chocolate spread as face camouflage, and operating a tank with which he was ‎completely unfamiliar.‎

The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into these and other mishaps ‎on the leadership and military levels. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a ‎decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to this ridiculous ‎theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions, when the ‎era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future.‎

Still, analysts pointed to the major blow suffered by Hezbollah in the war, pointing to the “restoration ‎of quiet” in the north and the heavy losses incurred by the terrorist group. One such optimist was ‎Iranian-born, London-based Middle East expert Amir Taheri, who visited the Jewish state in May 2007, ‎less than a year after the war was over — on the eve of the release of the Winograd Commission’s ‎interim findings. ‎

Hamas was one of the many entities rushing to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his successful quashing of the attempted coup against his government last weekend. Like leaders of other countries worldwide, the heads of the terrorist organization ruling the Gaza Strip hailed Erdogan’s success as a “victory for democracy.”

Unlike those who waited for the military takeover to fail before applauding the autocrat in Ankara, Hamas was genuinely relieved. After all, the Islamist Palestinian group has no greater friend than Erdogan.

Thus, Hamas has been able to proceed with its summer activities in a particularly festive manner. Two of these activities are particularly worthy of note.

The first is a special exhibit marking the second anniversary of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 incursion into Gaza to destroy the terrorist infrastructure — tunnels and missile-launchers — used by Hamas to kidnap and kill innocent Israelis.

Though Israel managed to decimate much of the infrastructure, leaving swaths of Gaza in ruins, Hamas did not feel defeated; nor should it have. No military match for the mighty Israeli army, it nevertheless succeeded in sending the Israeli populace into bomb shelters several times a day, while retaining political power and several tunnels and subsequently buckets of money and materials with which to keep its terror mill running.

To boost morale and demonstrate that it is doing its job properly, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades — amusingly known as Hamas’ “military wing” — has created a death-and-destruction Disneyland for family fun, free of charge. This consists of a display of various authentic weapons deployed in the slaughter of Israelis, and an extra-special tour of a tunnel bordering the Jewish state.